Ola Gustafsson

What are some of the everyday activities you perform at SSES?
I take photos, film interviews and footage for promotion videos for SSES for digital and print publication. I design and produce artwork for brochures, posters, books, cards. I maintain and update the visuals and design on all SSES affiliated webpages.

What is your proudest SSES accomplishment?
Being the visual part of the team making beautiful marketing around SSES and everything it stands for.

What are you most grateful for in your daily work?
That I’m at a place where my experiments are appreciated and encouraged.

How do you define success?
Feeling more and more happy about who I am and what I do, and how that is returned by those who receive those efforts.

If you could wake up tomorrow having gained any one quality or ability, what would it be?
Don’t know if that is relevant for me… I enjoy struggling to accomplish different things. I enjoy the journey. Maybe the ability to make “The Right Choices”?. But then again, I think I would miss making the wrong ones, because you always learn something useful.

What’s your guilty pleasure?
I’m a movie buff, so stories in all forms. But when no one’s watching you’d probably find me watching something sci-fi, horror or fantasy.

What book, movie, album, or creative work has had the most influence on you?
Aw, hard one! Because there are several. Book: Lord of the Rings (dad read it to me when I was 6); Movie: Alien (bought it as a comic when I was 10. I was scared for years. Not scared of it anymore but enjoy it instead); Album: Everything Beatles, Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” and Kraftwerks “Computer World”, Laurie Anderson’s “Mister Heartbreak” and “Big Science” – not to mention Kate Bush “Hounds of Love/The Ninth Wave” and then David Byrne/Brian Eno’s “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts”; Art: sculptures of Anish Kapoor and Olafur Eliasson that pushes and warps my perception of time and reality; Theatre: Plays by the Orion theatre in the 1990s. Specifically “Woyzeck” and “Ett Drömspel”; Comics: Moebius (Jean Gireaud) works, for instance “Arzach”. And of course Swedish publishing house Galago (1980s–1990s) with artists like Joakim Pirinen, Max Andersson, Lena Ackebo & Lars Sjunnesson.

What was the latest event or revelation that shifted your perspective on life?
Two important persons to me that passed away recently.

If you were a dish, which one would you be?
Stuffed zucchini flowers with lemon and parmesan.

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